Editor’s Note: In Celebration and In Memorium

In Celebration

Eric Slauter’s fine study The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (U of Chicago P, 2009), which Jonathan Elmer reviews in this issue, has won an honorable mention in this year’s MLA Prize for a first book, making him the most recent addition to the ranks of early Americanist winners of prestigious book prizes. Since 2000 scholars in the field have amassed an impressive array of book awards. Previous honorees for the first book prize include Matthew P. Brown, who won honorable mention for The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England (U of Pennsylvania P, 2007); Sean X. Goudie, who won the prize for Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic (U of Pennsylvania P, 2006); Paul Downes, who won it for Democracy, Revolution, and Monarchism in Early American Literature (Cambridge UP, 2002); and Patricia Crain, who did the same for The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter (Stanford UP, 2000). These five awards in ten years far exceed the cumulative total in any other field during the same period.

The MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize this year went to Laura Dassow Walls’s The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (U of Chicago P, 2009). Walls traces Humboldt’s American career from the late 1790s until his death in 1859 and beyond, but his formative experiences occurred between 1799 and 1804, when he travelled extensively in Latin America and the United States. The Passage to Cosmos shows how this extravagantly influential figure entered widely and deeply into American literature and culture in the years that followed his turn-of-the century journey.

Other organizations have recognized excellent work in early American literary studies. The American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies chose Martin Brückner’s The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (U of North Carolina P, 2006) as the recipient of the 2006–07 Louis Gottschalk Prize. And Susan Scott Parrish was awarded the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize of the Phi Beta Kappa Society for American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (U of North Carolina P, 2006).

This accumulating pile of awards manifests what many early Americanists have long known: that the field is a site of vibrant scholarly creativity; and that, after the passing of the Puritan origins paradigm established by Perry Miller, the field has reached a state of maturity with broad significance. It is gratifying to see that significance gradually coming to be recognized within the world of literary studies represented by the MLA and other organizations.

In Memoriam

Frank Shuffelton died on March 4, 2010, of complications from cancer. Frank was an accomplished Jefferson scholar and a beloved presence on the conference circuit. A graduate of Harvard and Stanford Universities, he spent his entire academic career at the University of Rochester, where he served as chair of the English department from 2003 to 2007. So beloved was he that his department hosted a retirement seminar and dinner for him in the spring of 2009, where I was fortunate to be invited to speak about his accomplishments along with Betsy Erkkilä and Philip Gould. It was a lovely tribute that the people who participated will not forget.

Frank is warmly remembered by many colleagues. Annette Kolodny, College of Humanities Professor Emerita of American Literature and Culture at the University of Arizona, writes of her relationship with him:

Frank and I were presences in one another’s lives long before we ever met in person. In the summer of 1962, just after graduating from Brooklyn College, I enrolled in a postgraduate publishing procedures course at Harvard. Also enrolled in the course was one of Frank’s former Harvard College roommates. Frank was away that summer, but during the course of the summer, I dated one of his roommates and got to know all the others. Part of the joy of the summer was...